Indie Bands (For the music lovers in all of us)

[indiebands]

Hi Everyone, I am really interested in what you think about my new forum. It's my first one and it's phase one of a bigger plan to bring indie bands to fans. Honesty is greatly appreciated, Cheers! 

Indiebands Forum: indiebands.boards.net/

[ChillyChica]

Hi indiebands!

Cool site! I like your banner and your boards all seem relevant and flow. I do have a few suggestions! Your banner is great, but then the rest of the forum is a little plain. Try adding a background image. It doesn't have to a photo of anything in particular, just search online for orange+gold+black+abstract+wallpaper or backgrounds or stock photo. There are tons for free online and you'll be surprised how many cool abstract arts you can find that add a bit of depth to your forum but are not distracting from the content. Also I would increase your text size across the board. Try large or xtra large for title texts and medium to large for body texts. A cool idea since your forum is about music, would be to add a sidebar plugin and the add a indiebands widget player so people could sample a song or two without diving into the forums. Maybe you get a guest and they have no idea what type of music this is, but its tempting to just press a play button if its just there for you real easy. That may help wrangle you some new members! Good luck and take care! =)

[indiebands]

Hey, Thanks a lot for the feedback. I made a few changes and would love to know what you think. And more feedback from everyone else would be greatly appreciated

[?§Bõ§§fõž§?]

Hello pal, couple of things:

- Love the fact the music doesn't automatically play at the top; drives you mad when they do. However, the feature doesn't work at all. No music plays when clicking play. Sad times.
- Banner is aligned badly, need to redesign it as half the text doesn't appear to the left.
- Headphone icons are stretched.
- Not enough forums; where are the announcement forums etc? Also, think about re-ordering them so the music forums are below things such as general chat (please note this is personal preference.. I like to have the general crap at the top as it tends to do better in the long run once more members come through although newer forums tend to have the theme of forum at top).

[indiebands]

Fixed up most of the suggestions, which I appreciate greatly. I am still working on fixing the music player. Other then that are there any other suggestions, would love to hear more

[ChillyChica]

Hi Indiebands!

Wow, your site is looking great! I really like the music player you installed at the top, and the background compliments the banner well, looks a lot more professional. Adding the side boxes help give you a bit more to look and interact with than just the forums. You could also add a custom page and link it through the navigation at the top and add a video page, just place embedded YouTube videos or anything else, like even link a tab up top to a page that shows and searches band venues or a link to a shop where people can buy/ download music. You can be creative and make it more than just a 'forum'. Check out my site if you want, I used the forum in a different way, may give you some ideas with using widgets. youscoopnews.com Keep up the good work!

[indiebands]

I will definitely look into making more custom pages! And I would like to thank you so much for your input. can't wait to see your site when it is complete looks awesome so far.

As for any other feedback from anyone, I am still open ears. Any opinions on what can be done to populate the site with more members? or what pages, widgets, plug-ins can be added to enhance the user experience would be greatly appreciated

[ChillyChica]

Anything you think your members would like to see and use on your site. The more they can do there they will stay longer and come back. Like custom pages with youtube videos on it, links to places where they could buy or download music, links to sites that show band tour dates things like that. There is also a widget that will post the newest forum posts on the front page, you can set to show how many you want shown, then people could see what members are talking about on your forum without them having to click and go through the forum. As far a getting more members and traffic, definitely advertise on your facebook page. Tell your friends about it. Also submit your site to google, yahoo and bing search engines directly. Heres the link for google: www.google.com/submityourcontent/website-owner/ Its free but you may need to have a google gmail to submit it. This will ensure that the search engine crawlers are picking up your site and getting moved up towards the top of the search pages. For yahoo and bing just search bing+submit+website+search+engine same for yahoo search engines. You could make a twitter account for your website and advertise that way. Send out tweets from your site about bands and such include links to your site and use the top trending hashtags to reach a bigger audience. Also can look into SEO for your site, there are free SEO tools out there for you to use that can help your individual pages get picked up by the search engine crawlers. searchenginewatch.com/article/2303494/21-Best-FREE-SEO-Tools-for-On-Page-Optimization

Good Luck & Have Fun! =) Thanks for looking at my website as well!